Documentary looks at 1942 Grey Cup champs

Stu Cowan, The Gazette11.08.2012

Members of the 1942 Royal Canadian Air Force Hurricanes celebrate their Grey Cup victory. A TSN documentary titled The Photograph, pays tribute to a team that inspired a country by winning the 1942 Grey Cup during the Second World War.

We all know the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Well, The Photograph is worth a lot more than that — and it also serves as a timely reminder of what a poppy stands for in this country.

The Photograph is the latest instalment in TSN’s excellent Engraved on a Nation documentary series celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Grey Cup. The Photograph premiered Friday at 7:30 p.m. on TSN, and will be shown again at 3 p.m. Saturday on TSN and at noon Sunday, Remembrance Day, on CTV.

The Photograph focuses on a picture of the 1942 Toronto Royal Canadian Air Force Hurricanes, a team that inspired a nation en route to winning the first ever non-civilian Grey Cup game. On Dec. 5, 1942, the Hurricanes beat the Winnipeg RCAF Bombers 8-5 in front of a sellout crowd on a frozen field at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium, boosting the country’s morale during the Second World War while thousands of Canadian soldiers listened overseas on radio.

The Hurricanes were made up of a group of young men who arrived in Toronto in January 1942 after being recruited by the air force. Flying officer Lew Hayman, who won three Grey Cups as coach of the Toronto Argonauts in the 1930s, convinced the base commander to allow him to form a football team as a respite from the endless rotation of marching and drilling during basic training.

On the morning of Aug. 19, 1942, 7,000 Canadian soldiers stormed the German-occupied beaches of Dieppe on the northern coast of France. By midday, nearly 1,000 Canadians were dead and more than 2,500 were wounded and taken prisoner. It became obvious the only way to drive the Germans back would be by air attack, and in Canada 130,000 airmen would be trained to help retake Europe.

Most of the Hurricanes had never flown a plane before, having to learn meteorology and aerodynamics as part of flight training during the day, before heading to football practice at night. One of the Hurricane players was Jake Gaudaur, who would go on to become commissioner of the Canadian Football League from 1968 until 1984.

He’s the one who had The Photograph.

The documentary, which was directed by Manfred Becker, focuses on Gaudaur — who died in 2007 — and his story is told by his daughters, Jackie and Diane, as they learn about the brotherhood their father forged with his teammates.

“My father wasn’t here to tell his story, and I believe all of the teammates have now passed,” said Diane, who had yet to see the film when I spoke with her this week. “So naturally, they turned to the family and seem to have made my father a bit of the focus of the story from what I understand.”

Diane said the Hurricanes team photo was never framed or displayed in the Gaudaur home when she was growing up and that her father never spoke about it with his daughters. She came across it while going through her father’s papers after he died.

“Although Dad kept this photograph in his possession over his lifetime, he never shared its meaning, who these young men were, from where they came,” Jackie says in the film.

Gaudaur’s 89-year-old widow, Molly, recalls in the film how the photo would move her husband when he did look at it.

“He had tears in his eyes,” she says. “He would show it to me, but we didn’t talk about it very much.”

One of the players in the photo is Ed Poscavage, an American Gaudaur met on his first day of basic training. Poscavage, who played football at Ohio State, was one of the few Hurricanes who had flown before, but he had been expelled from the U.S. air force after crashing a plane during training. When Gaudaur figured he was heading overseas, he proposed to Molly and Poscavage was his best man at the wedding.

“I think most of us thought that ‘take love while you can,’” Molly recalls in the film.

But Gaudaur never went overseas. After graduating flight school at the top of his class, the RCAF made him a flight instructor and kept him in Canada to train other pilots for the war. Fifteen Hurricanes players did go overseas and only eight of them returned. Poscavage was one of the seven Hurricanes killed in action.

No other professional sports team in Canada lost as many men in the war.

“My impression was he felt he should be going overseas, too,” Molly says in the film. “Being a man, he would like to get into the belly of the fight.”

After the war, Diane believes her father suffered from survivor’s guilt.

“I wonder … because if anybody would feel survivor’s guilt it would be my father,” she told me. “He was just that kind of person … he was sensitive and responsible. He did what he was told to do, and what he was told to do was to stay here and teach flying. ... He was certainly grateful that he had a life that these others did not have, but I’m sure there would probably be a bit of that (survivor’s guilt) in there.”

The documentary follows the Gaudaur sisters as they learn the stories behind The Photograph and the young men who are in it. Among the papers they found in their father’s files after his death was a charcoal sketch he had drawn of Poscavage wearing his pilot’s helmet that he had never shown to anyone. In the film the sisters track down Poscavage’s only living family members, a niece and nephew in Connecticut, and present the drawing to them in an emotional scene.

I asked Diane if there’s a message she hopes people will take away from the film.

“I think to appreciate and respect that generation because I think they were a special generation of humanity … they lived through a lot,” she said. “Never forget veterans and never forget your family in general. Appreciate, as we all do at this time of year, that there was a group who gave their lives for our freedom.”

“I’m happy to see kids wearing poppies,” she said. “Every time I see somebody with a poppy I always have a measure of respect for them and I’m glad that they remember, and I don’t think any of us should ever forget that period of history. Hopefully we learn from that and it’s something we will never relive.

“The poppy and remembering those stories I think should be an essential part of our nation’s history, and for many people our personal history as well.”

Diane recalls the last Remembrance Day service she attended with her father before his death.

“I looked up and he had tears in his eyes,” she told me. “My father was not given to any displays of emotion and didn’t talk much. I said, ‘Are you OK, Dad?’ And he said, ‘I’m just remembering all the friends that I lost.’”

In 1938, McGill University’s football and hockey teams both captured national championships. Seven players from those two Redmen teams were killed during the Second World War. Read more on Stu Cowan’s blog at montrealgazette.com/stuonsports

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